Overview
Developed through the Digital Scholarship at Oxford (DiSc)-funded Mapping Their Finest Hour project, the map presents stories, photographs, and objects from the Their Finest Hour Online Archive, showing how personal accounts of service, evacuation, internment, and everyday life were interconnected across Britain and beyond.
Using the Map
This interactive map brings together locations and journeys drawn from the Their Finest Hour Online Archive. Each point represents a place mentioned in a contributor’s story, from local communities and family homes to distant battlefields and prisoner-of-war camps.
You can:
- Explore individual stories by clicking on a map pin. Each opens a short summary with links to the full record and image gallery.
- Filter by year or theme to see how experiences unfolded over time or to focus on specific aspects of the war, such as evacuation, service overseas, or life on the Home Front.
- Compare journeys by switching the visibility and filter controls to trace different people’s movements side by side.
- Change the basemap or overlay settings to add historical context by showing terrain, transport routes, or wartime boundaries.
- Zoom and pan to explore connections across regions and continents, from Britain and Europe to India, Africa, and the Pacific.
Together, these features allow users to see how individual lives intersected within the global story of the Second World War and to explore the archive in an entirely new, visual way.
Project Team
- Principal Investigator: Prof Stuart Lee
- Research Assistants: Catherine Conisbee and Dr Matthew Kidd
- Research Software Engineer: Alexander Shiarella
